ABSTRACT
Nāgārjuna (c. 150-200 CE), the Andhra-born and Nālandā-trained giant of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, is not often consulted for his ideas on ethics or liberating Buddhist practice, despite the fact that three works considered reliably attributable to him, the
Bodhisambāraka, and Ratnāvalī, are entirely concerned with these. Much more common in contemporary scholarship are commentaries that parse his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Vigrahavyāvartani for their anti-metaphysical and antiepistemological arguments. Nonetheless, kārikās 8, 17 and 24 of Nāgārjuna’s main work on Buddhist philosophy, the Mūlamadyamakakārikā (hereafter MMK) can conceivably be understood as a kind of mini-treatise on the “proper” Buddhist way to think about efficacious virtuous conduct. In these chapters, Nāgārjuna resists various versions of a Buddhist moral dualism between good and bad actions in favor of an admittedly metaphorical explanation of karma that draws a powerful parallelism between “common
law” (vyavahāra) and karmic “debt” The claims that are laid out in this minitreatise are in fact profoundly ethically provocative in the light of contemporary debates in deconstruction on aporia or the impossibility of justice as the deconstructability of law (droit) as well as the relation between justice and the economy of the “gift” (cadeau). Indeed, because he is attempting to valorize the bedrock Buddhist notion of pratītyasamutpāda, “co-arising” or “co-completion,” Nāgārjuna’s logic of action, though it is certainly deconstructive in its impetus vis-à-vis other Buddhist views of moral adjudication and achievement, nonetheless offers a counter-discourse to Derridean deconstruction, as it rejects the oppositional tensions between law and justice or giver and recipient in favor of a visualization of action that places the “paramount aim” (paramārtha) of human freedom (nirvana) wholly within the transactional chains of the functioning community. In the Derridean model of ethics, justice can only be pursued through an overcoming, through a confrontation with the limits of the present law or with the compulsions of debt created through reciprocity. With Nāgārjuna, one can only realize freedom through the very workings of the social economy itself; there are no limits to transcend in working out one’s karmic condition because, as he puts it, “there is no distinction of bondage from freedom; there is no distinction of freedom from bondage. The limit of freedom is but the limit of bondage; between them not even the subtlest thing is recognized.”1 For Nāgārjuna, ethics and justice are not “inventional,” as Derrida’s conception has been labeled; they do not deconstruct social law so that actions more proximal to justice may be carried through, but are rather co-produced as the direct
consequences of acts that are inimical to them within the unfolding of life and the transactions of community.2
